one that's closest to being ready to lift straight out of "My Life" is the story of his family and his childhood. It's a tale tinged with sepia, at once melancholy and idyllic. The family's closet was stacked with skeletons. Bill Clinton's father's name was William Blythe, as, technically; was his own till he had it legally changed, at sixteen. Blythe senior died at twenty- eight, in a car crash, three months before young Bill was born; not until he was forty-six and already President did Bill Clinton learn, via a Washington Post in- vestigative story; that his father had "prob- ably" been married three times before meeting his mother, and that he had a half brother and a half sister of whose ex- istence he had no clue. At four, Bill ac- quired a "handsome, hell-raising, twice- divorced" stepfather, Roger Clinton, whose self-doubt and binge drinking "kept him from becoming the man he might have been." The incident when the teen-aged Bill angrily faced down his drunken stepfather and stopped him from beating his mother is well known; less so is a trauma years earlier, when lit- tle Bill, a kindergartner, saw Roger pull out a pistol and fire at his mother before being taken off to jail for the night. There is more along these lines. But his rela- tionship with his salty; fun-loving mother, Virginia Kelley; was always close and ten- der, and his fractured family was the nucleus of a huge, overlapping set of var- iegated clans that, as he writes with clear- eyed practicality, "gave me kinfolk in fif- teen of Arkansas' seventy-five counties, an enormous asset when I started my po- litical career in a time when personal con- tacts counted more than credentials or positions on the issues." Volume II of the Little Clinton Li- brary might be a Dreiserian bildungsro- man, the story of an eager provincial lad whose world opens out through college in Washington and a term-time job with his fellow-Arkansan J. William Ful- bright, the distinguished and dissenting chairman of the Senate Foreign Rela- bons Committee; who discovers Europe, Western and Eastern, on a Rhodes Schol- arship to Oxford; and who struggles through to a kind of truce with his con- science in dealing with the great character test of his generation, the draft and the Vietnam War. A diary he kept during this period helps him trace the tumult of his feelings with unusual clarity and 82 THE NEW YOR.KER., AUGUST 2, 2004 specificity: In that character test, Clinton neither excelled (as did, for example, John Kerry; who fought heroically in the war despite doubts about and finally full- throated opposition to it) nor flunked (as did, for example, Dick Cheney; who both supported the war and single-mindedly avoided getting anywhere near it). Clin- ton simply passed. You might say that he graduated, but sine laude. His angst- ridden thrashings are easily ridiculed, but he confronted his dilemma, obsessed over the moral implications of each of his fit- ful decisions, faced the personal and pub- lic issues before him with the utmost se- riousness, and redeemed himself: in part, by participating in the responsible, mod- erate wing of the antiwar movement more actively than all but a few thousand of his contemporaries. The coda of this volume would take him through law school and his Tracy-and-Hepburn courtship of Hillary. The Little Clinton Library volumes on Clinton's Arkansas ascent, which over eighteen years took him from a los- ing congressional race to five terms in statewide office to the Presidency; and on his eight years in the White House would have an overarching theme: the challenge of liberal governance in an era of harsh conservative mobilization and chronic legislative deadlock. The lessons that Clinton took from his reëlection defeat after his first two-year term as governor of Arkansas were both personal and politi- cal. The former, he writes, was summed up by a friend who told him, "Bill, the people thought you were an asshole!"- an admonition that I suspect is a first for Presidential memoirs. The latter he sums up himself: If I hadn't been defeated, I probably never would have become President. It was a near- death experience, but an invaluable one, forcing me to be more sensitive to the political prob- lems inherent in progressive politics: the system can absorb only so much change at once; no one can beat all the entrenched interests at the same time; and if people think you've stopped listening, you're sume The right hated Clinton because it thought he was deceitfully disguising a high -tax, nanny-state, libertine liberal agenda in the language of mainstream moderation. On the left, which fully warmed to him only when he got caught with his pants down, the rap on him was that he didn't stand for anything-that he was a trimmer, a sellout artist, a slick self- seeker. One can find evidence for either proposition in "My Life," if that's what one is looking for. The simpler explana- tion is that his purpose was roughly what he thought it was, to use himself as an in- strument to effect change in a roughly consistent direction-toward a fairer, more egalitarian, more tolerant society; an economy in which the harsher effects of efficient markets are cushioned by social programs designed to equalize opportu- nity and encourage self-sufficiency; and a world in which peace is underwritten by political democracy and, especially; eco- nomic integration. T o be a political instrument-to be in politics-one has to politically sur- vive. Clinton did what was necessary. Perhaps the most notorious of all Clinton s-aft " B '.c" " I did ' . nhal " " I quote er nelS, n tIe, did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky;" and "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is"-comes from his 1969 letter to a reserve colonel: "I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system." If one can see nothing but cynicism in this statement, one will be blind to the core of honor, a little tarnished but real, that I, for one, discern in Bill Clinton. Politics, democratic politics at any rate, is com- promise, and sometimes the compro- mises are internal, and compromises of that kind can seem especially corrosive. Does Clinton, in his heart of hearts, truly favor capital punishment, which has al- ways been his public position? I don't know. But I doubt it. In "My Life" he says almost nothing about the subject, even though he presided over Arkansas's first executions in a decade. The name of Ricky Ray appears in the book, in con- nection with the passage of an anti-AIDS measure called the Ricky Ray Hemo- philia Fund, but the name of Ricky Ray Rector, the mentally damaged conVIct who was executed in Grady; Arkansas, three and a half weeks before the 1992 New Hampshire primary; does not. In Arkansas when Clinton was coming up, one could be against the death penalty or one could have a political career, but one could not do both. Clinton's silence on the matter is evidence either of shame or of a chilling ability to compartmentalize. Clinton's Presidency divides into two periods-not pre- and post-Monica but